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NOTES FROM THE FIELD
SUPERSTARS OF TECHNOLOGY
Why are there so few trading cards for great inventors?
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
AROUND OUR COMpany’s offices, people like to revisit a 1994 article from our sister publication, American Heritage. It shows a set of trading cards from the late nineteenth century that depict not baseball players or actresses but prominent newspaper editors. Staring at the grid of chromolithographs of thoughtful-looking men, nearly every one bearing facial hair and a name that is entirely forgotten today, is a sobering reminder of the obscurity that awaits us all—at least those few of us who have not managed to achieve obscurity already. This end seems appropriate with newspapers, which, as journalists like to remind themselves, are fated to be repurposed for wrapping fish (which is one more use than can be found for old magazines).
Not long ago a slow afternoon, an impending deadline, and the purchase of some baseball cards for a nephew combined to inspire a search for similar cards relating to technology and invention. There aren’t many. In 2000 the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers put out a miniset of five Canadian engineering triumphs, all fairly recent: a jet engine, a robotic hand, an integrated circuit for fiber optics, a new type of compact disc, and, of course, a hockey helmet. Beyond this lie a number of airplane and military technology card sets aimed at enthusiasts for such things. And that’s about it. The deficiency is discouraging; after all, engineers do much more for society than, say, social theorists, who have their own set of cards at www. theorycards.org.uk.
Science and mathematics cards are easier to get hold of. A set of 102 is available for purchase under the unfortunate name Nerdkards. These can be found at www.nerdkards.com.
A different group of 26, with slightly greater design sophistication, is at www.alltooflat.com/geeky/ scientists. Mathematician cards can be found at www.mathcards.com, but (befitting their subject, perhaps) they are strictly virtual, so if you want a set, you’ll have to print them out and glue on the backs yourself.
Chemistry trading cards have a long history partly because, in an odd twist, one of the world’s most prolific publishers of trading cards was founded by the great German chemist Justus von Liebig. The company originally produced (and still makes) a meat extract Liebig invented, but it soon branched out into creating cards for promotional purposes. In 1929, between issuing such sure-fire hits as Birds’ Feathers and Their Uses, The Inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and Old Belgian Farms, it published a set of six Famous Chemist cards. Another six-card Liebig set depicted the history of alchemy, and in the 1930s a Belgian cigarette company put out its own set of chemist cards.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort came in 1953, when the sports-card company Topps put out a set of 135 “Look ‘n See” cards of nonsports figures (with the lone exception of Babe Ruth). It included Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, George W. Goethals, Wilbur Wright, and many others from technology and science among such disparate luminaries as Nero, Anne of Cleves, Billy the Kid, and John Philip Sousa. (Strangely, there are no editors in the set.) Original Look ‘n See cards can be bought for a few dollars apiece, and until some enterprising (or foolhardy) entrepreneur comes along to issue a new set for the twenty-first century, it looks as if they will have to suffice. |
FROM OUR AUTHORS
A trio of new books by Invention & Technology contributors
THE LEVELS OF EXPERTISE THAT our Invention & Technology authors achieve within the confines of a few thousand words often make us wonder what they could do on a larger canvas. As the works listed below prove, good magazine writers lose none of their effectiveness in the transition to book form.
ROBERT ZIMMERMAN
the author of many space-related Invention & Technology articles through the years, has written Leaving Earth, a history of American and Soviet/ Russian space stations, just published by Joseph Henry Press (560 pages, $27.95). Zimmerman makes weighty claims for his subject, seeing space stations as not just a metaphor or reflection, but an actual cause, of what he believes is America’s decline since the early 1970s, as well as of Russia’s overthrow of Soviet rule and subsequent revitalization. “Just as the bold Soviet space program helped teach the Russians to live openly and free,” he writes, “the top-heavy and timid American space program of the late twentieth century helped teach Americans to depend, not on freedom and decentralization, but on a centralized Soviet-style bureaucracy—to the detriment of American culture and its desire to conquer the stars.”
This theme is taken up repeatedly, but not all the book is devoted to ideology. Zimmerman presents a profusion of striking vignettes, including a Skylab crew cobbling together a 25-foot-long tool with a wire cutter at the end to free a stuck solar panel and a desperate Soviet cosmonaut dashing blindly through a smoke-filled cabin to find the source of a sudden fire. He also explains how long-term spacestation occupants, on returning to Earth, “had to break the habit of simply letting go of objects when they were done with them” and of trying to float off their beds when they woke up.
T. A. HEPPENHEIMER
by far the most prolific author in the history of Invention & Technology, marks this year’s aviation centennial with First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane (Wiley, 394 pages, $30,00). With his training as an aerospace engineer, Heppenheimer is well qualified to explain the state of aviation knowledge at the time the brothers began their quest and the obstacles they had to overcome to get into the air.
He also displays the obsession with detail that can be found in any good biography, as when he reports that the Wrights’ pantry in their camp at Kitty Hawk contained “cling peaches, pineapple, plums, coffee, sugar, cornstarch, salt, pepper, spices, flour, cornmeal, tea, cooking oil, as well as the Royal Baking Powder that Orville had picked up on arriving in Elizabeth City.”
Heppenheimer shows how Orville and Wilbur’s experience as bicycle mechanics led them to pursue solutions that other experimenters with far more extensive academic credentials, such as Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley, had neglected. First Flight is a fine account for general audiences of who the brothers were and how they learned to fly, as well as an explanation of their later struggles, much less expertly managed, to improve, protect, and profit from their invention.
GEORGE W. HILTON
a distinguished economist and historian who has written for Invention & Technology about cable cars and interurban railways, tackles another form of transportation with Lake Michigan Passenger Steamers (Stanford University Press, 364 pages, $75.00). Milton’s narrative begins with the founding of Chicago in the 1830s and ends with the collapse of the industry a century later (though the last passenger steamer from the dassic era, the Milwaukee Clipper, was not retired until 1970). The book also contains histories of the major steamship lines and a list of each firm’s most important ships. Along the way we learn that the counterclockwise circulation of water in northern Lake Michigan was discovered in 1869, when “Herbert Field was murdered in Manistee [in Michigan], but his body was found 30 miles to the north,” and that Chicago steamship lines did a regular business carrying couples to St. Joseph, Michigan, where they could take advantage of that state’s less stringent marriage laws and then return to Chicago in a bridal chamber.
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